Lycaenops: Part Three

I think that if Oscar Wilde were to have a Lycaenops ornatus skeletal diagram on the wall of his study it would be this one. It's all about the mauve.

I did this all in Illustrator. I used the Live Trace feature to convert my pencils into vectors. I really like that function -- it keeps a lot of the initial juice from the pencils and gives you a nice clean editable vector image.

The last time I did this I couldn't figure out how to handle the color in Illustrator; this time I hit the books and found out how to do Live Paint. Worked like a dream; even with the studying it took me a lot less time to achieve the same results. I believe I'm falling in love with Illustrator all over again.

Irritatingly, when I went to double-check the name of the brute on Wikipedia, I found a high-definition photograph of the skeleton that was used as the basis for the diagram from which I worked. (I believe I will keep that awful sentence; perhaps I'll have it stuffed for my collection.) I'd started this project off with some googling for these kinds of images.

Damnit. Wish I'd had that at the start.

Now to whack the color out of the skeleton and print it up and start drawing over it... See you in a while.

Lycaenops: Part Two

Not exactly the pose I had in mind when I started, but at least it's got a little motion to it.

Well, this wound up giving me more trouble than I thought -- since this was based on a drawing that was based on a drawing that was based on --

Anyway, there wasn't as much subtle detail as I usually get out of a skeletal diagram. And the femur covered part of the pelvis and I couldn't find an image of a gorgonopsid pelvis anywhere on the net so I had to fake it. And my tremor has been giving me merry hell so the line quality is even shakier then usual. And the pose looks a bit dorky...

... but I think I'll be able to get a good finished piece out of it.

I'm gonna go take care of my editing, then come back and try and get the finished version of the skeleton before tonight's writer's group meeting.

Oh, man, the iPod just threw up some Primus... ah, it'll be here when I come back.

Lycaenops: Part One

This comes from The Ecology And Biology Of Mammal-Like Reptiles and is credited 'after Colbert.' I'm taking this to mean that it was actually drawn by Edwin H. Colbert, but I could be wrong.

The thing that gets me is that I have no idea whether or not this pose was one that Lycaenops could take. Because I am an ignorant swine.

So I'm nosing up against a deadline here and I know I'm gonna be late... so it's time to liveblog another paleo art piece.

I've been wanting to draw a gorgonopsid (gorgonopsian?) for some time so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I've been in a bit of a daze lately -- when spring break hit my brain went into a hypercogitative state and rendered me useless for all practical purposes. Instead I thought about things like my novel, my place in the arts, the state of my life, my conception of reality -- you know, the light stuff. It was good and useful but now it's over and I've got to get cracking.

So hunted down the two reference images above in order to start work. I prefer to start with good photographic reference for the skeleton but a) if the photo is anything but a strict profile it distorts the proportions badly and b) there just ain't enough photos like that around. I frequently wind up using a skeletal diagram, which makes me feel like a fraud and a ripoff. Oh, well.

In order to quell those feelings I like to reposition the animal. This involves figuring out the new pose and then tracing the individual bones of the skeleton to match. I felt a little dissatisfied with pose of the last one of these I did, so I hunted up my yardsale copy of Animals In Motion by Eadweard Muybridge and poked around until I found the second above image.

I took the skeletal diagram and enlarged it in Photoshop, printed it on two sheets of paper and taped 'em together. Now I've got a piece of tracing vellum taped to my drawing board, a .5 mechanical pencil, an eraser, and my references.

The fun part of drawing is that I can listen to music. The missus gave me her old iPod and an amp for it a while ago and I've got it loaded with a really odd mix of pop -- I just heard a bluegrass version of Casey Jones (they found him there with his hand on the throttle/scalded to death by the steam) and now Black 47 is singing about Irish political resistance and it's time to put graphite to paper.

More to come.